Books by Brian Polcyn
Charcuterie Craft of Salting,Smoking,And Curing
by Brian Polcyn, Michael Ruhlman, Yevgenity Solovyev
The only book for home cooks offering a complete introduction to the craft.Charcuterie—a culinary specialty that originally referred to the creation of pork products such as salami, sausages, and prosciutto—is true food craftsmanship, the art of turning preserved food into items of beauty and taste. Today the term encompasses a vast range of preparations, most of which involve salting, cooking, smoking, and drying. In addition to providing classic recipes for sausages, terrines, and pâtés, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn expand the definition to include anything preserved or prepared ahead such as Mediterranean olive and vegetable rillettes, duck confit, and pickles and sauerkraut.Ruhlman, co-author of The French Laundry Cookbook, and Polcyn, an expert charcuterie instructor at Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan, present 125 recipes that are both intriguing to professionals and accessible to home cooks, including salted, air-dried ham; Maryland crab, scallop, and saffron terrine; Da Bomb breakfast sausage; mortadella and soppressata; and even spicy smoked almonds. 50 line drawings.
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Meat Pies: An Emerging American Craft
by Brian Polcyn, Michael Ruhlman
From the innovative team behind Charcuterie, a cookbook featuring 90 recipes for savory pies―meat pies, vegetable pies, turnovers, vol-au-vents―and their accompaniments.
Chef Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman continue their vital work of elevating the art of charcuterie in Meat Pies, a collection of recipes, advice, and step-by-step visuals for home cooks and professionals eager to expand their knowledge of meat-and-vegetable concoctions topped, enclosed, or wrapped in dough. The book is divided into sections defined by crust―the contemporary pot pie, the hand-raised pie (individual pies), rolled-raised pies, double-crusted pies, turnovers, vol-au-vents―and once readers master each dough, they can re-create their work and invent their own. Within each category of pie are rediscovered favorites, such as a chicken pot pie with a biscuit crust, as well as new spins on classics, including seafood pies, a sheet-pan pie, portable handheld pies, and a showstopping vegetable pie with a braided crust.
Informed by Polcyn’s decades of award-winning cooking and teaching, and brought to life by Ruhlman’s engaging prose, Meat Pies presents a comprehensive and exciting guide to a burgeoning American craft. 75 color photographs
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$39.99
Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing
by Brian Polcyn, Michael Ruhlman
The craft of Italian salumi, now accessible to the American cook, from the authors of the best-selling Charcuterie. Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn inspired a revival of artisanal sausage making and bacon curing with their surprise hit, Charcuterie. Now they delve deep into the Italian side of the craft with Salumi, a book that explores and simplifies the recipes and techniques of dry curing meats. As the sources and methods of making our food have become a national discussion, an increasing number of cooks and professional chefs long to learn fundamental methods of preparing meats in the traditional way. Ruhlman and Polcyn give recipes for the eight basic products in Italy’s pork salumi repertoire: guanciale, coppa, spalla, lardo, lonza, pancetta, prosciutto, and salami, and they even show us how to butcher a hog in the Italian and American ways. This book provides a thorough understanding of salumi, with 100 recipes and illustrations of the art of ancient methods made modern and new. 100 illustrations; 16 pages of color photographs
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Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing
by Brian Polcyn, Michael Ruhlman
An essential update of the perennial bestseller.
Charcuterie exploded onto the scene in 2005 and encouraged an army of home cooks and professional chefs to start curing their own foods. This love song to animal fat and salt has blossomed into a bona fide culinary movement, throughout America and beyond, of curing meats and making sausage, pâtés, and confits. Charcuterie: Revised and Updated will remain the ultimate and authoritative guide to that movement, spreading the revival of this ancient culinary craft.
Early in his career, food writer Michael Ruhlman had his first taste of duck confit. The experience “became a fascination that transformed into a quest” to understand the larger world of food preservation, called charcuterie, once a critical factor in human survival. He wondered why its methods and preparations, which used to keep communities alive and allowed for long-distance exploration, had been almost forgotten. Along the way he met Brian Polcyn, who had been surrounded with traditional and modern charcuterie since childhood. “My Polish grandma made kielbasa every Christmas and Easter,” he told Ruhlman. At the time, Polcyn was teaching butchery at Schoolcraft College outside Detroit.
Ruhlman and Polcyn teamed up to share their passion for cured meats with a wider audience. The rest is culinary history. Charcuterie: Revised and Updated is organized into chapters on key practices: salt-cured meats like pancetta, dry-cured meats like salami and chorizo, forcemeats including pâtés and terrines, and smoked meats and fish. Readers will find all the classic recipes: duck confit, sausages, prosciutto, bacon, pâté de campagne, and knackwurst, among others. Ruhlman and Polcyn also expand on traditional mainstays, offering recipes for hot- and cold-smoked salmon; shrimp, lobster, and leek sausage; and grilled vegetable terrine. All these techniques make for a stunning addition to a contemporary menu.
Thoroughly instructive and fully illustrated, this updated edition includes seventy-five detailed line drawings that guide the reader through all the techniques. With new recipes and revised sections to reflect the best equipment available today, Charcuterie: Revised and Updated remains the undisputed authority on charcuterie. 50 line drawings
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Pâté, Confit, Rillette: Recipes from the Craft of Charcuterie
by Brian Polcyn
The best-selling team behind Charcuterie and Salumi further deepens our understanding of a venerable craft.
In Pâté, Confit, Rillette, Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman provide a comprehensive guide to the most elegant and accessible branch of the charcuterie tradition. There is arguably nothing richer and more flavorful than a slice of pâté de foie gras, especially when it’s spread onto crusty bread. Anyone lucky enough to have been treated to a duck confit, poached and preserved in its own fat, or a pâté en croûte, knows they’re impossible to resist.
And yet, pâtés, confits, rillettes, and similar dishes featured in this book were developed in the pursuit of frugality. Butchers who didn’t want to waste a single piece of the animals they slaughtered could use these dishes to serve and preserve them. In so doing, they founded a tradition of culinary alchemy that transformed lowly cuts of meat into culinary gold.
Polcyn and Ruhlman begin with crucial instructions about how to control temperature and select your ingredients to ensure success, and quickly move on to master recipes, offering the fundamental ratios of fat, meat, and seasoning, which will allow chefs to easily make their own variations. The recipes that follow span traditional dishes and modern inventions, featuring a succulent chicken terrine embedded with sautéed mushrooms and flecked with bright green herbs; modern rillettes of shredded salmon and whitefish; classic confits of duck and goose; and a vegetarian layered potato terrine.
Pâté, Confit, Rillette is the book to reach for when a cook or chef intends to explore these timeless techniques, both the fundamentals and their nuances, and create exquisite food. 35 color photos
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